Language Learning Quotes

“Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.”
― Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

“When you learn a language, you don't just learn to speak and write a new language. You also learn to be open-minded, liberal, tolerant, kind and considerate towards all mankind.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“...Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.”
― Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

“HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“He agreed that I should buy another dictionary or, better yet, a phrase book with standard Spanish expressions. He also suggested that it would be a good idea if I learned to stammer, because people would get bored listening to me and would finish the sentence for me; this way my accent wouldn't be noticed.”
― Henri Charrière, Papillon

“Languages aren't just made of words. They're modes of looking at the world. They're keys to civilizations. And that's knowledge worth killing for”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Your languages determine how interesting you are.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Languages are like beings:
they thrive, take a dive,
and need care to survive.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“A language is not meant to be imprisoned in grammars and dictionaries, it is meant for the lungs and the tongue.”
― Pep Talk Radio, LinguaVerse: A Journey through Language Realms

“If you wanna know about a culture, you can read about it in any language - but if you want to experience that culture like your own, you gotta do it as one of their own - through their own native language.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thoughts became different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Over time, I have come to believe that if language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.”
― Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds

“Languages are but echoes of each other, Based on the environment each feels unique. No language is superior, no language is inferior, All are born of human mind to meet at heart's peak.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“I don't do drugs, languages are my LSD.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Abigitano: El Divino Refugiado

“The receptionist was a petite Asian woman of forty who spoke English so precisely that Tuck knew it had to be her second language.”
― Christopher Moore, Island of the Sequined Love Nun

“Understanding the language is a quintessential part of understanding the culture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Wambach's concerns raised questions about the impact that deaf signers could have on Project Nim, and perhaps inadvertently about how Terrace's study might compare with the work done by the Gardners in Nevada, who had expressly designed their experiments to include deaf signers. Simply having Falitz sign at the weekly meetings and interpret for Wambach in the discussions brought a new dimension to their work. Wambach was not particularly critical of Terrace, who was older and far more established than she, but she wanted the staff to have a better understanding of the world of deaf speakers—those who used ASL because they needed a language.
Thanks to Wambach, the chimp project began attracting deaf volunteers (including one who is remembered for having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles), who formed a small subculture within Terrace's staff. In an attempt to bridge these two worlds, one night the deaf volunteers arranged to plug up the ears of the hearing staff and take them out to a restaurant for dinner. They were instructed to communicate exclusively in ASL from the moment the plugs were placed in their ears on the way to the restaurant, during the meal, and all the way back to Delafield. The hearing group found the experience to be a terrible struggle. But what made an indelible impression on Johnson was the way that everybody in the restaurant spoke really slowly and loudly to them, treating them as if they were all mentally incapacitated.”
― Elizabeth Hess, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human

“For many years, before ASL was recognized as a language in its own right, Deaf people described using sign language as "the way we communicate at home." (Page 81)”
― Diane P. Chambers, Communicating in Sign: Creative Ways to Learn American Sign Language (ASL)

“Even though English is the universal language of earth, due to its primitive colonial escapades, and indeed the most convenient, it is neither the most beautiful nor the most soulful language on earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“The proper psychological approach for a cultural rapprochement between the East and the West is not to force ‘English’ education on Indian boys when they
are young, but to bring them into close personal contact with the West when they are developed, so that they can judge for themselves what is good and what is bad in the East and in the West.”
― Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim

“In a world where words are often mere amusement, it is imperative to forge a new dictionary that enlightens the masses on the true worth of spoken words. For those who underestimate its power, fail to realize the energy they emit and the consequences they yield. What we give with our words, we receive - a universal balance that demands understanding and respect.”
― Yvonne Padmos

“Broken polyglots are potent polyglots.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Language is the rich fabric that enshrouds all experience that is truly human. Those who are hyperpolyglots therefore adorn multiple layers of beautiful fabrics at the same time. They have multiple lives in one sense; and they certainly have multiple souls.”
― Usman W. Chohan, HYPIA at One: HYPIA Annual Report 2017

“I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“She was surprised at how easily she was finding her way around, as if the geography of a place were another language and she was developing her ear for the sounds, oft-used words, and the way in which movement echoes speech. She had come to know that every city has its ebb and flow, its tide pools, rivers, and still waters; the time she'd spent wandering had aided her immersion.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich

“I have no mother-language, every mother is my mother, every language, my language.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Learning a language promoted the first tender shoots of intercultural understanding. People became familiar with previously alien concepts and, as a consequence, more open to them.”
― Fay Abernethy, First Contact, Second Chances

“I never hankered for booze or drugs, you know why - because I'm already drunk, with the most hard-hitting, brain-altering contraband in history - I'm ever consumed with languages and cultures.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Language is just an over-glorified byproduct, real conversation happens between the pauses.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper